Peter Kreeft, and 10 Lies of Contemporary Culture

What follows is Dr. Peter Kreeft's "10 Lies of Contemporary Culture", delivered as the commencement address at Steubenville's Fransiscan University on May 14, 2022. Kreeft is a Roman Catholic apologist, and I just thought that he knocked it out of the park with this list. You can read the full transcript here, and view and listen to his speech here. Note that Dr. Kreeft's Roman Catholicism shines through throughout his speech, and my sharing of the outline of his speech is not an endorsement of Roman sentiments. I am unashamedly a Protestant and Reformed Christian.** But Dr. Kreeft is extremely astute in his cultural analysis, and he should be taken seriously by all who love the Lord and love the truth. 

10 Lies of Contemporary Culture: 

1. You can be whatever you want. No; we are hemmed in by limits on every side. This is not hard to see though it might be hard to admit.

2. The most important person in the world is you. No; you're very small compared to the grand scheme. Embrace it if you want to find happiness.

3. The world needs you and you can save the world. No; similar to #2, you'll live, die, and the world will continue on without you, with all the same problems (see Ecclesiastes 1). 

4. You need education in creative thinking, ie, the ability to create new realities. No, you cannot create realities, only organize God's reality. The most creative of us are only creative in a limited sense.

5. You need education in critical thinking, ie, not to seek positive truth but to cultivate a negative skepticism towards anything claiming to be truth. But this leads, as Lewis said in Abolition of Man, to so seeing through everything that you end up unable to see anything. You end up like Pontius Pilate: "What is truth?" (Jn. 18:38)

6. All peace is good peace. Is it? To say so is to say that there is no place for war, and that includes war against Satan, sin, the flesh, lust, greed, pride, etc. Kreeft notes that the Bible uses the word "enemies" 272 times. How can all peace be good peace if Scripture says we have enemies? Even God has enemies (see Psalm 2:1-3). 

7. If you want peace, seek justice. How has that worked throughout world history, and how is it working in the world currently, especially in angry revenge-driven America now? 

8. The end of all ends is open-mindedness and tolerance. Kreeft notes that an open mind is a good means but a bad end. It is a good means to learning truth, but it is disastrous if it is the end of all learning, ie, just having an open mind. Then what is true? Again, we're back to Pilate. If you have too open of a mind, everything in it will fall out. Eventually your soul will be empty, too.

9. All you need is love, sweet love, and no truth. Such "love" clearly refers not to God's love, which is defined Scripturally as that which God finds lovely (see 1 Jn. 5:2-3), but as a feeling. So the feeling of love is exalted. Thus "if it feels good, it must be right." Kreeft notes that that's what Hitler felt. 

10. Freedom is an end, not a means. That is, our being free is is the end of all pursuits of justice. But freedom for what? Scripture says freedom is the means to the end of serving God (Rom. 6:22). If we have freedom, it will be, as Bob Dylan said, to serve somebody. We'll either serve ourselves and the world, or God. But freedom is never an end; only a means. 

Kreeft then notes what holocaust survivor Victor Frankl said about how America should balance the Statue of Liberty in New York with a Statue of Responsibility in San Francisco. (Can you imagine?) But, as Kreeft concludes, to do so would violate the current day's Ten Commandments, which state: Don't be 1. Judgmental, 2. Repressive, 3. Dogmatic, 4. Intolerant, 5. Uncompassionate, 6. Unfeeling, 7. Insensitive, 8. Narrow-minded, 9. Hypercritical, or our new f-word, 10. Fundamentalist.

But regardless of the strength of the lies, truth will remain. Like John the Apostle said, darkness tries to strangle the truth, and it always has, and, until the end, it always will (Jn. 1:5). But it cannot and will not win. As Luther wrote of Christ, "He must win the battle." So be truthful and faithful, and, as Rod Dreher's recent book was entitled, Live not by lies. 

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**For an interesting case that Protestants should, on the basis of the Apostle's Creed, use the word "Catholic" to refer to the global gospel-preaching church, because otherwise we let the Roman Church hijack the word, creating the oxymoronic "Roman Catholic" term, see R. Scott Clark's article "Catholicity, Confusion, and a Corrective," here. Clark cites Puritan William Perkins as well as other Reformed confessions to show that Protestants have historically refused to cede the term "catholic" to the Roman church, because the term, contrary to their own historical narrative, far predates them. Protestants who have the gospel are catholic in the original sense of the term. But a protestant cannot say that the Roman Church is catholic, because their message has changed from the original Apostolic church.